AIBRIEF
Australia's two biggest supermarket chains are running early facial recognition trials, with Victoria cited as a key pressure point for rising theft and violent incidents, six months after a tribunal cleared Bunnings to use the same technology.
Coles and Woolworths have run early facial-recognition trials in Australian stores, with both chains pointing to rising theft and violent incidents in Victoria as the trigger, the Australian Financial Review reported.
The tests are at the evaluation stage, not a confirmed rollout. A Coles spokesperson told Yahoo News the technology targets crime gangs, not petty criminals. Coles is separately rolling out weighted shelves, suspicious-activity CCTV, and locked cosmetics cabinets in the same Victorian stores.
The chains are testing a legal opening the Bunnings tribunal carved out in February 2026. The Administrative Review Tribunal ruled Bunnings' 2018–2021 system was permitted under a privacy-law exemption. The Hitachi-built system ran across 63 NSW and Victorian stores and auto-deleted non-matches in 4.17 milliseconds, and the ruling reversed the OAIC's prior breach finding. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner warned the ruling was not a "green light" for widespread biometric surveillance.
That posture is now in tension with the trial: CHOICE said 17 of 25 retailers it contacted, including Coles, Woolworths and Aldi, had publicly committed they were "not using facial recognition in stores and have no plans to introduce it." QUT retail expert Gary Mortimer expects other chains to follow Bunnings' lead.
The chains have not named which cameras are enrolled, whether staff are in scope, the retention window, or who audits the matches.